GUITAR

ZAPPA in the eighties was not good. I'm sorry, I probably shouldn't be that direct and make such a daring statement but with the exception of "Ship arriving too late", all the ZAPPA albums in the eighties are extremely hard to swallow for me because most of them sound as they have a lot of instruments playing all kinds of stuff at the same time and making the music incomprehensible or, like in this case, there is only one instrument taking all the space of the album.

"Guitar" is a double live album released in 1988 and, as its name implies, it is only guitar and guitar and guitar. Yes, Frank ZAPPA was a very good guitar player, there's no doubt about that, but we can appreciate that in several brilliant guitar solos he played in some of his 70's songs such as "Black napkins", "Muffin man", "Zoot allures" and the immortal "Watermelon in Easter hay", but all of those songs were in albums with other songs that showed the brilliance and creativity of the other musicians who played with Frank: the drums by Terry BOZZIO, the keyboards by George DUKE, the saxophones of Napoleon MURPHY BROCK or the xylophones of Ruth UNDERWOOD (just to name a few and those names depend on the album we're talking about), in "Guitar" it's just that: guitar.

The album starts with "Sexual harassment in the workplace" which is a really good song when you hear it isolated from the album; my first encounter with this song was in the compilation "Strictly commercial" and I thought (and I still think) it is a great song with a powerful guitar line filling it almost entirely. Further than that, the album falls in the "everything sounds exactly the same" kind of record and it is very hard to tolerate it because it lasts a whole hour and just when you thought it is over you realize there is one more CD with another hour of the SAAAAAAAAAAAAAME stuff.

Maybe "In a gadda Stravinsky" would be the second song that I'd save from this album: you don't have to be extremely smart to understand that it is a weird (ZAPPA-like) cover of IRON BUTTERFLY's "In-a-gadda-da-vida" with a touch of Igor STRAVINSKY's influence; this song reminds me a lot to the early albums of ZAPPA & THE MOTHERS (especially "Burnt weeny sandwich" and "Uncle Meat"). It is a good (but not that much) song.

If we talk about an artist who has sooooooo many records as Frank ZAPPA it is easy to find some albums that are not that amazing. Even when I adore Frank ZAPPA and almost everything that he recorded from 1966 to 1982 I sincerely wouldn't recommend to listen to this or any other ZAPPA album recorded after 1982 (it is important to mark a difference between recorded and published and in this case I think it is especially important) in it's entirely; however, I would recommend to listen maybe one song of this album today, another one in two or three days, then another one after a week and maybe listening to it song by song with a lot of huge intervals and maybe then it would be a nice (not great) record.

DO NOT LISTEN TO IT AT ONCE!!

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